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This is the second article in a series of three articles. The first focused on the importance of making businesses more future-proof and how to overcome common barriers to digitization.. We also discussed how modernizing on-premises infrastructure can best be managed through hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as part of a hybrid cloud approach and modernization that blends the best of old and new.

In this article, we’ll examine the challenges businesses must consider to develop and maintain a holistic security strategy in a hybrid environment.

Security starts before the attack

Without exception, cybersecurity issues remain a high priority and pose a real threat to organizations. The recent mega breaches of customer data from renowned companies only serve to underline the importance of security. Hacked and breached data from workplace sources such as mobile and internet of things (IoT) devices, coupled with the newly differentiated and remote workforce as a result of covid-19, has changed the threat landscape. In fact, new demands for security, particularly identity and access management, to protect remote workers and critical corporate data, achieved significant growth in HCI last year.

The vast majority of businesses too much unprotected data. Security breaches have the power to disrupt all business and bring even the most robust organizations to a standstill. The increasing adoption of cloud-based models is bringing a new level of concern for many organisations, especially among those new to the cloud transition.

All of this comes to a single conclusion: the need for a comprehensive security strategy for any business considering hybrid cloud adoption.

A multi-layered security strategy

Changing business environments, additional data usage, and evolving threat landscapes require organizations to adopt a new perspective on security to support stability, innovation and growth. Organizations need a built-in, unified approach with intelligent threat protection for workloads running in cloud-to-edge environments. Intel and Microsoft are working together to create a chain of trust between software and hardware technology to help protect an organization’s data and applications wherever they are located in the hybrid environment.

This multi-layered security strategy integrates Azure Stack HCI software with Intel hardware, where Secure core servers provide modern security by relying on the hardware root of trust as a critical building block. The secure kernel program provides additional capabilities that represent the device standard you should look for when choosing HCI hardware, including firmware sandbox and virtualization-based security (VBS).

Comprehensive security requires multiple aspects, including simplification of processes, enhanced protection capability, and a preventative defense posture. VBS allows you to isolate critical parts of your system, even protecting you from privileged malware. With Microsoft’s Secure core servers, all these capabilities are enabled, allowing IT and security operations teams to focus their attention where it’s needed most.

As the layers of security software evolve, attackers and malicious people work their way down the stack looking for new vulnerabilities to exploit. Microsoft continues to invest in exploit mitigation technologies that can better take advantage of the security benefits of advanced hardware. With this in mind, Intel believes that security should start at the lowest possible layer, namely silicon. Intel helps establish a chain of trust to protect data at all stages of its lifecycle, whether data is at rest, in flight, or in use. It builds on technology innovation in 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with capabilities ranging from creating a reliable hardware-based execution environment to encrypting memory and separately protecting virtual machines and data in use, to crypto acceleration delivering breakthrough performance. enables pervasive encryption in the cloud or at the edge.

Security professionals need the ability to identify and directly address threats as they arise in day-to-day operations across the organization. Here, Azure Defender offers the broadest resource coverage of any extended detection and response technology (XDR) on the market today, covering users, devices, applications, virtual machines, SQL databases, IoT, and more from a single vendor.

Azure Defender protects Azure and hybrid environments and ensures that your cloud infrastructure resources are protected from common threats such as brute-force virtual machines or attacking storage or SQL injection, and even mitigating threats to containers, the key management service for IoT devices. Azure Defender provides protection for all these resources directly from within the Azure experience and extends protection to on-premises and multicloud virtual machines and SQL databases using Azure Arc.

Tools to support your mission

Forward-thinking leaders agree that implementing a unified infrastructure across software and hardware can rapidly strengthen an organization’s security posture. However, to realize the full benefit of a secure approach to hybrid cloud, organizations will need tools to assess the security state of networks, protect workloads, raise security alerts and remediate attacks, and make recommendations to address future threats. cloud with no deployment overhead.

Azure Security Center provides a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers and provides advanced threat protection across your environments. Organizations can also leverage Azure cloud services for backup and security without having to deploy additional on-premises infrastructure.

Providing businesses with a foundation for the future

Cloud-provided, cloud-managed infrastructure consolidation enables organizations to modernize and future-proof investments by adopting a true hybrid cloud infrastructure with total security in mind. If your organization is ready to adopt a comprehensive security strategy for a hybrid environment, learn more about Azure Stack HCI today.

Check out the latest Intel-based Azure Stack HCI systems and new features at azure.com/HCI. While you’re there, download the software Microsoft offers for a free 60-day trial.

Bio: Talal Alqinawi is senior director of product marketing for Azure marketing at Microsoft, where his passion for the cloud and how AI is driving digital transformation informs the company’s cloud marketing and product strategy.